adrienne73
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Recommended Raid Configuration for Bare Metal Virtualization on Dell Server
I have a new Dell R620 Server with 4 146 GB SAS Drives and 4 600 GB Drives. I'm thinking of going with a VMware bare metal setup. The more I read the more I get confused. I guess there is some iDrac software that I should use from Dell, but other than that I'm wondering how I should set up the RAID. I'm used to setting up a RAID 1 for the OS and then a 5 for data. Does anyone have any pointers, articles or even books that would point out what would be the best practices.
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USB flash drives and SD cards, rarely fail, we've been using USB/SD card installs since 2004!
and none have failed, and are still in production.
The USB/SD card is not used after the Server has booted! Keep a copy as per my article, and your done!
Hard Disks fail more often than flash!
Yes, RAID 10 for Both, although it's rather wasted to install ESXi on four disks, it only uses 1GB!
and none have failed, and are still in production.
The USB/SD card is not used after the Server has booted! Keep a copy as per my article, and your done!
Hard Disks fail more often than flash!
Yes, RAID 10 for Both, although it's rather wasted to install ESXi on four disks, it only uses 1GB!
First thing is you have 4x 146GB and 4x 300GB disks so 5 disk RAID configurations are out for you! You cannot use 146GB along 300GB disks!
So since you are going to use virtulization you must consider each vistual machines memory first! That is important because when you assign 32GB memroy to a virtual machine, that means your 32 GB HDD space will dissapear at the beginning. PLUS your vistual OS such as Windows server also requires around 20GB. Without installing or doing anything your significant amount of HDD space going to be used. Above example only for 1 single virtual machine!.
Ofcourse if you don;t need much data storage then go for RAID 10 for 4x300GB and 4x146GB sets. This will give you the best performance, best protection and worst space! Fault tolerance 1 (2 if the HDD failure on the same span)
Alternatively you may go for RAID5. If you are going to do write intensive work then forget it. This option will give better overall HDD space, same read performance as RAID 10 and worst write perfromance. Fault tolerance 1 HDD only.
So since you are going to use virtulization you must consider each vistual machines memory first! That is important because when you assign 32GB memroy to a virtual machine, that means your 32 GB HDD space will dissapear at the beginning. PLUS your vistual OS such as Windows server also requires around 20GB. Without installing or doing anything your significant amount of HDD space going to be used. Above example only for 1 single virtual machine!.
Ofcourse if you don;t need much data storage then go for RAID 10 for 4x300GB and 4x146GB sets. This will give you the best performance, best protection and worst space! Fault tolerance 1 (2 if the HDD failure on the same span)
Alternatively you may go for RAID5. If you are going to do write intensive work then forget it. This option will give better overall HDD space, same read performance as RAID 10 and worst write perfromance. Fault tolerance 1 HDD only.
Folks type faster than me. I hope I didn't step on anyone’s toes with my response. Believe me, I second hanccocka's comments about installing on an SD card or UBS stick. It's very easy to recover from a dead SD card than it is to recover from an dead disk array where VMware was installed.
We have 11 VMware hosts that are all on SD cards.
We have 11 VMware hosts that are all on SD cards.
ASKER
Thank you to all for your recommendations. USB Flash drive with 2 RAID 10s it is. So no Dell iDrac right?
The iDRAC is a really nice to have piece of gear - not a requirement. If you can budget it, I say get it. It will allow you to install VMware and manage your server remotely. All our servers have an iDRAC.
unless you lose networking, or cannot get to the console, iDRAC not required
ASKER
Thanks to all for your answers. They are most helpful.
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